A stiff breeze ruffled the Hudson River one morning early this week, sending white-topped wavelets scudding inshore and setting a lone swimming bird bobbing on the swell. The steel-blue water reflected fat clouds and the towering Palisades, the cliffs austere in their winter cloak of granite.

Just gazing at the river from the platform of the Spuyten Duyvil train station made the heart sing. Imagine if Riverdale were no longer cut off from that beauty. Imagine a Hudson able to feed the minds and spirits of New Yorkers as it once fed their bellies and pocketbooks.

The possibility of realizing the dream so many have dreamed for so long is very real. But a Parks Department suffering from amnesia threatens it.

The Department has endorsed a scheme to create artificial wetlands in the Harlem River alongside the train station and Spuyten Duyvil Shorefront Park. $365,000 in the capital budget for parks would extend the bridge used by commuters to reach the station platforms across the railroad tracks. But the Parks Department's chief planner said last week that he did not envision using the bridge to give people access to the largest plot of land west of the train tracks, the Spuyten Duyvil Triangle at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson.

In so cavalierly dismissing the possibility of access to the Triangle, Stephen Whitehouse, director of planning for the Parks Department, squandered not only decades of citizen efforts to gain access to the Hudson, but the quite recent work and promises of New York City's government.

Indeed, the funds to extend the bridge at Spuyten Duyvil Station are in the capital budget because they city envisioned using the Triangle as park land.

In 1987, the Parks Department under Commissioner Henry Stern threatened to take Metro-North to court in insure access to the Hudson's shore. "We want the public to have access to the river, and we'll do anything to get that done," said the Department's lawyer.

Three years later, the Dinkins Administration began discussions with Penn Central Corp., which owns the air rights to the Triangle, to lay the foundation for a purchase. Parks Commissioner Betsy Gotbaum told The Press the land was pivotal to New Yorkers' hopes for the Greenway.

The failure of Mario Cuomo's environmental bond issue disrupted plans to purchase the site from Penn Central, but the city's 1993 Plan for the Bronx Waterfront, which used a picture of the Henry Hudson Bridge, Spuyten Duyvil station, and the Triangle on its cover, asserted that the "most important waterfront issues" in Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil "relate to the need for increased public access." It recommended emphatically that the city acquire the Triangle and add its five acres to Spuyten Duyvil Shorefront Park. "Pedestrian access to the site could be provided by extending the overpass at the Spuyten Duyvil railroad station," it added.

In 1995, just after the State Legislature voted to include New York City in the Greenway, local elected officials and community activists toured the Triangle. State Senator Guy Velella said he was confident that state funds should be found to acquire the site.

Metro-North has ambitious plans to reroute commuter trains to Penn Station. It wants to restore disused tracks in the Triangle leading to the swing bridge at the mouth of the Harlem to send its Harlem Line trains down the West Side.

It is, perhaps, understandable that the railroad doesn't want to be bothered with looking for ways that people could safely share the site. But it passes comprehension that the Parks Department would so willingly acquiesce in their exclusion

It would be absurd to build the bridge to the Triangle only to build a fence at its foot. Riverdalians have not struggled for 30 years to rescue the shorefront from development to be confronted at the last by an ugly barbed-wire-topped chain link fence at the banks of the Hudson.

Nor is this merely a Riverdale issue. At stake is the possibility of opening the city's shoreline to all New Yorkers, instead of forcing the Greenway to an upland route.

How the Triangle can be used both by the railroad and for recreation is a dilemma. To solve it, someone has to think seriously about how to achieve that goal.

The Parks Council confronted a similar problem at the Jerome Park Reservoir, and hired a landscape architect who solved it elegantly. The Council is a partner in the Harlem River Restoration project. Perhaps it could lend its expertise again.

The Hudson River Valley Greenways Council makes grants to further the goal of river access. It could be a source of funds to employ a park designer to study the Triangle.

With plans being made to build the bridge, the time to begin such a study is now. It would serve to remind the Parks Department that the Spuyten Duyvil Triangle offers an opportunity to complete the most visionary and majestic public space of our time, a necklace of green along a great river that restores the Hudson to the people.